Mixed Presence in Mixed Reality: Charting the Challenges and Opportunities

Paper Title

Mixed Presence in Mixed Reality: Charting the Challenges and Opportunities

Publication Info

• Topic area: Mixed-presence environments in Mixed Reality, focusing on challenges, methodologies, and future research directions.
• Keywords: Mixed Presence, Mixed Reality, Augmented Reality, collaboration, user representation, spatial awareness, system complexity, sensory feedback, accessibility, privacy.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: The design and development of mixed-presence systems in Mixed Reality lack a systematic overview, leading to fragmented solutions and repeated efforts to address recurring challenges.
• Significance: Mixed-presence systems have the potential to enhance collaboration across remote and co-located participants, impacting applications such as surgery, hybrid meetings, and classrooms.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has explored collaborative systems in AR/VR but has not systematically investigated mixed-presence systems, their challenges, or future research directions. Existing surveys focus on specific aspects like remote collaboration or physical tasks but lack a comprehensive view of mixed-presence environments.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A systematic review of mixed-presence systems in Mixed Reality, categorizing challenges and identifying future research directions through an expert workshop.
• Novelty:
  1. Comprehensive collection of recent research on mixed-presence systems, highlighting trends, use cases, and study methodologies.
  2. Categorization of challenges into four themes: Technology, Environment, User, and Cross-Cutting.
  3. Identification of 659 challenges and synthesis of actionable research directions.
  4. Expert workshop to propose future research opportunities in eight categories.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Literature survey using PRISMA guidelines with a query targeting spatially distributed, collaborative, mixed-reality systems.
  • Coding and thematic analysis of challenges across 147 papers.
  • Expert workshop with 15 participants to refine and expand research directions.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified 659 challenges across four categories: Technology (e.g., device limitations, latency), Environment (e.g., spatial consistency, blended environments), User (e.g., representation, sensory feedback), and Cross-Cutting (e.g., asymmetric experiences, privacy).
  • Categorized use cases into Communication & Collaboration (72 papers), Instruction & Guidance (65 papers), and others like Assembly & Arrangement (27 papers).
  • Study methodologies predominantly qualitative, with 118 papers reporting user studies using questionnaires, interviews, and performance metrics.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a structured overview of challenges and actionable insights for researchers and developers, addressing gaps in prior fragmented research.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Literature corpus of 147 papers spanning 2016–2025.
  • Expert workshop with diverse participants from Mixed Reality, HCI, Visualization, and related fields.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Strict exclusion criteria may have omitted relevant theoretical frameworks and older foundational research.
  • Challenges underrepresented in the corpus may still exist in adjacent fields.
  • Future work should explore accessibility, privacy, and domain-specific applications in greater depth.

Summary

This paper systematically reviews mixed-presence systems in Mixed Reality, categorizing 659 challenges into Technology, Environment, User, and Cross-Cutting themes. It highlights trends, use cases, and study methodologies from 147 papers and proposes eight actionable research directions through an expert workshop. Contributions include a structured resource for researchers and developers to address recurring challenges and design robust mixed-presence systems. Future work should focus on accessibility, privacy, and equitable participation across diverse user contexts.